While the best known colony of American impressionist artists in France was established in Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, the aesthetic developed in other rural art centers as well, most notably in Grez-sur-Loing, near the Forest of Fontainebleau. There, the principal agent for the introduction of Impressionism was the Boston painter, Robert Vonnoh. Vonnoh attended the Academie Julian in Paris in 1881 and returned to Boston in 1883, teaching at the newly formed Cowles School in 1884 and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1885. After his marriage in 1886 to Grace D. Farrell, he and his bride may have honeymooned briefly in Grez; the following year, he returned to France for further study at Julian's, but beginning in the fall of 1887, he spent much of the next three or four years in Grez, before returning to Boston in the spring of 1891. Many of Vonnoh's figural canvases of the 1880s reflect his allegiance to strong, tonal Naturalism, but by 1888 he was beginning to work out-of-doors on bright, colorful landscapes and nature studies of flowers, which reflect his involvement in the Impressionist aesthetic. Indeed, Vonnoh's art of the late 1880s suggests an almost schizophrenic artistic persona; it is difficult to believe that the same painter created in the same year, 1888, both his dark, strongly modeled Companion of the Studio (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) and his several depictions of flaming, brightly colored Poppies (Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago), shadowless and pushed up against the picture Plane, and executed with slashing brush and palette knife work. But, like a good number of American painters of the period, Vonnoh was reluctant to surrender in his figure paintings the academic precepts he had labored so dearly to master, while in his landscape work, for which academia training had offered little preparation, he felt freer to investigate newer, more modern strategies. Vonnoh's "conversion' to Impressionism has been attributed to the influence of the Irish painter, Roderic O'Conor, who had adopted the bright, unmixed hues and thick impasto of Impressionism by 1886, and may have been in Grez as early as that year. Vonnoh may also have been led to Impressionism through the example of Alfred Sisley, working nearby in Moret-sur-Loing.
